Refugee Run Redux at Davos: the UNHCR displaced?

A year ago this blog featured an invitation to Experience Life as a Refugee at Davos.  Some commentators and myself criticized the Refugee Run as an insensitive fund-raising event by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR listened to the criticism -- and repeated the event this year at Davos. (HT Rex Brynen at PAXSIMS.)

The Refugee Run provides a snapshot of the often terrifying ordeal suffered by people forced to flee their homes because of violence or persecution. In Davos, the unique simulation is being used to help some of the world's most influential people understand the plight of refugees and internally displaced people, empathize with them and support the efforts of UNHCR to help them.

Participants face a range of scenarios, including fleeing a rebel attack, navigating a minefield, .... facing up to potential sex traffickers...

Lord Mark Malloch Brown, the former UN deputy secretary-general and one-time UNHCR staff member, was among those who have taken the run this week.... "this is a compelling way to remind one of what it's like," he said, after completing the hour-long exercise. "I felt helpless all the time, and very exposed," he added.

TWOFER: Here’s how Haitians can rescue the US from its budget crisis and save themselves

In 2001, I published an obscure paper that concluded “Econometric tests and fiscal solvency accounting confirm the important role of growth in debt crises.” Based on this, I can now say that Haitians can rescue the US from an impending budget crisis. The crisis is already severe, with previously unthinkable warnings that US government bonds might lose their AAA rating. What does this have to do with Haitians? Here’s the longer, more technical version (if you’re impatient, skip to next paragraph): budget solvency is about the future, not just about the present. Our ability to service our government debt is greater the higher is expected growth of the economy, because that means higher expected growth of tax revenues. If you expect tax revenue to be a lot higher tomorrow because of high growth, then you don’t have to worry as much about where you find the tax money tomorrow to pay interest and amortize principal on the debt. Economic growth equals (Growth of GDP per person) PLUS (Growth of Population). So one overlooked aspect of Population Growth is that it is GOOD for preventing budget and debt crises. And population growth is driven in large part these days in the US by immigration from places like … Haiti. Of course it will take more than Haiti alone to supply enough immigrants, but letting in more immigrants to the US from poor countries is desirable already for both us and the immigrants.

Here’s the short version. If you are worried about having enough tax revenue to pay interest on the government debt, find more taxpayers! And look, here are some people volunteering to become new taxpayers: Haitian immigrants fleeing quakes and poverty! So let’s open the door to our Haitian fiscal rescuers, who will also lift themselves out of poverty as dramatized by a previous post. It’s a TWOFER!

NOTES: my attempt to make an exam question out of this did not attract a large response (OK I was mostly just trying to get out of writing the blog post last night). It did produce one very funny satire, and one good two-part answer, the second part of which was the “right” answer (a special virtual Rolex (Aid) Watch prize for Kevin!)

.

Haitians save USA's AAA bond rating

READER EXAM EDITION: come up with a coherent story in which this headline would (or will in the future) make sense.

China in Africa myths and realities

In recent years, journalists and pundits in the West have looked on China’s economic engagement with Africa, including foreign aid, with growing alarm. An NYT op-ed a few years ago called China a “rogue donor,“ giving aid that is “nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens.” Other negative stories about China in Africa include China abetting genocide in Darfur by supplying arms in exchange for Sudanese oil; propping up corrupt government in Zimbabwe; swooping in to undo the anti-corruption work of the IMF or the World Bank in Angola or Nigeria with offers of no-strings-attached loans; and generally ignoring environmental, safety and labor standards on projects in Africa.

So the idea that China’s aid to Africa could be in any possible way better, more credible, or more effective than Western aid to Africa may be a hard sell. But Deborah Brautigam, author of the new book The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa, argues that focusing only on the China threat makes us blind to the real opportunities Chinese engagement offers for African development.

Part of the problem, says Brautigam, is that there is very little information about what China is really doing in Africa, and in this vacuum, “myths sprang up and were rapidly accepted as facts.” Brautigam fills this void and dispels, or at least complicates, some commonly held beliefs about China in Africa.

In other areas she finds evidence to back up criticism of China’s Africa policies, but argues that we should not see China’s stance towards Africa as static; it is evolving and can sometimes be influenced by international pressure. Throughout, some of Brautigam's best insights come from asking "compared to what?":  The book seeks to compare Chinese aid to Western aid as it really is, not as we wish it were.

A few examples of China myths and partial truths:

1) China targets aid to African states with abundant natural resources and bad governments

Actually, China gives money to almost every single country in Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding only those that don’t acknowledge the One China policy. There is little evidence that China gives more aid to countries with more natural resources or specifically targets countries with worse governance. China is not alone in its interest in natural resources in Africa, and natural resources are not the primary motivating factor for Chinese aid: like all donors, US definitely included, China is motivated to give aid by a mix of political, commercial, and social/ideological factors.

2) The Chinese don’t hire Africans to work on their projects

This depends on how long a company has been working in Africa, and how easy it is to find appropriate local labor. Ultimately, it also depends on African governments themselves, who have the power to dictate what proportion of project staff must be local (as Angola and the DRC have done). Brautigam also points to the stark contrast in standard of living between Chinese workers and managers in Africa, who tend to live in extremely simple conditions, and Western advisors, who more typically live in expensive housing or hotels. While Western experts may be fewer, they cost their projects a lot more.

3) China outbids other companies by flouting social and environmental standards

This one’s true but evolving…Brautigam portrays China as “on a steep learning curve,” struggling with environmental and corporate social responsibility issues at home and abroad. She gives some evidence that China and Chinese companies are becoming increasingly sensitive to international perception on these issues and may be inching towards international standards.

--

This Wednesday (February 10) NYU’s Development Research Institute and the Wagner School are co-hosting a lunchtime seminar and book launch event with Professor Brautigam. Click here for more information and to RSVP.

UPDATE: This event has been cancelled due to inclement weather and will be rescheduled. People who have already RSVP'd will receive an email when a new time is confirmed.

Who gets the Last Seat on the Plane? Why Aid Hates Economics

Not long ago, I was returning home from a trip when the airline bumped me from my flight due to overbooking. The airline rep was very sympathetic, but I didn’t want her sympathy, I wanted A Seat On the Plane. She had traded off my wishes against those of other passengers, and I lost. Economists are unpopular because we say there is always SOME resource that is overbooked in aid, and aid is Forced to Choose: who is going to get the Last Seat on the Plane?

Politicians and advocates try to argue their way out of the Scarcity and Tradeoffs, using one or another of these proven strategies:

(1)   There really is no scarcity

This is Sachs’ central argument for more money in aid –you should never be forced to choose who should live and who should die, so you should always ask for more aid money. This has been effective as advocacy, but still doesn’t make aid money an infinite resource – there is still a limit on how much rich people will give. And the scarce resource is not only money – it is also political capital, rich peoples’ attention, or effective and accountable aid workers in the field. So using AIDS as an example, sure you should do some of both treatment and prevention – but how much of each? In the end, they are still competing for limited Seats on the Plane.

(2)   Our project doesn’t use any scarce resources

This argument is usually made by omission. The Millennium Villages don’t advertise that they are dependent on one extremely scarce resource -- Western experts -- perhaps it would then become obvious that they are neither scalable nor sustainable. And of course there is a big tradeoff between the Millennium Villages and better projects you could do with this scarce Western expertise. A better project replaces the scarce foreign expertise very soon with more abundant local expertise and labor – such as training programs to transmit foreign technical skills to locals, who will in turn pass it on to other locals.

(3)   My cause actually is the same as your cause

Advocates of one cause often argue many other causes NEED their cause. If the necessity is absolute, then indeed the tradeoff disappears. If it is less than 100 percent absolute, there is still a tradeoff. Hey, Other Passenger who took my seat: don’t claim that You are so Important that it’s pointless for Me to get on a plane without You! Unless You are the Pilot.

In summary, there really is scarcity and aid really is forced to make intelligent choices. Be sure to give a seat to the pilot.

It’s a love fest!

Starbucks, in partnership with RED, recently announced a plan to have musicians in 156 countries participate in a Global Sing-along, which produced this totally adorable video:

What does this have to do with the price of (coffee) beans? The All-You-Need-is-Love fest is part of a giant global plan to save the continent of Africa from dying of AIDS (and also maybe sell some coffee and reap the marketing benefits of associating their brand with the compassionate, virtuous, saving Africa image).

If you spend $15 at Starbucks, they’ll give you a CD with above song on it (supplies limited!), and donate a dollar to the Global Fund.  It gets more convoluted from there: Go online to the Starbucks love website and draw a cutesy love card to trigger another donation from Starbucks to the Global Fund, this time of 5 cents. Finally, if you upload a video facing your computer camera and singing goofily along to the Beatles classic, Starbucks will toss the GF another nickel.

It's almost enough to make you forget that if you bypassed Starbucks all together and just donated your $15 bucks to the Global Fund you’d be helping…15 times more.

Debates on losing the AIDS War

We got some great comments in response to yesterday’s post How the war on AIDS was lost.  Much of the debate centered around three questions: 1) Isn’t treatment complementary to prevention?  And so there is no tradeoff?

While some agreed with the post’s overall assertion that prevention has been neglected in favor of treatment, Caitlin argued that this distinction is artificial: “in many places, the availability of treatment makes prevention possible.”

Gregg Gonsalves expanded: “ART can reduce viral load and transmissibility. In the absence of a vaccine or a microbicide and the difficulties in achieving behavior change in general in public health, can you afford to be so categorical about AIDS treatment? Might ART provision be an important part of HIV prevention strategies?”

OUR RESPONSE: We all agree that there should not be 100% of one and zero of the other. Beyond this, we disagree. Even if treatment does help prevention, this is only partial. (Treatment is not 100% necessary and sufficient for prevention).  And they are still two separate goals. So there is still SOME tradeoff between efforts that target treatment and those that target prevention.

2) Do we know how to do prevention? If not, why not?

Uganda is often cited as a prevention success story, but Justin added that “there is still a lot of debate over what actually accounts for the Uganda decline in infections, but even if we could narrow down the cause, it may not be generalizable to other countries because of different patterns and cultural practices. And even in Uganda, the trend is reversing.”

One problem is that while treatment shows obvious, life-saving results, there is more room for human messiness and error with prevention. Unsurprised wrote: “Prevention cannot be bought with aid dollars…The problem is NOT that more financial resources have gone to treatment rather than prevention, but that no one—especially local leadership—has ever been serious about sending the necessarily blunt and uncomfortable messages it takes to get people to change their sexual behaviors.”

Avam pointed to the downsides of a development economics-centric approach, and others emphasized the power of locals rather than global “experts” in figuring out prevention for their own communities. Caitlin said that many communities did “figure out” prevention in their own areas, but that these gains were not sustained or brought to other communities.

OUR RESPONSE: These are all good points, and Aid Watch is very familiar with the ideas that (1) money alone does not solve problems, including prevention, and (2) solutions arise from local people and are specific to each area. Our point was that the international effort could have helped contribute advice to prevention programs, but it didn’t because treatment effort crowded out prevention effort. In fact, Helen Epstein and Daniel Halperin have offered insights like the effectiveness of male circumcision to lower transmission and the importance of multiple long-run sexual partners in transmission in Africa. The international AIDS effort ignored them for a long time and is still not serious about applying these insights.

3) Who are the “Searchers” and who are the “Planners” in the quest for more effective AIDS treatment and prevention?

Caitlin took the post to task for leaving out local community leaders' explanations of  for how we got to where we are today. Gregg Gonsalves argued that the post pinned blame on well-known experts and funders, while “fail[ing] to acknowledge that most of the drive for treatment has been derived from local activism in Brazil and Thailand, first, then South Africa, then with help from activists most with small NGOs in the North…You ignore your own “searchers”– the “little” people who have been building up the AIDS response for 30 years and invest all the power in the planners…who come late into the game.”

OUR RESPONSE: You are right, I have been inconsistent about this. Solutions usually do arise from local searchers, and I should be more respectful of how the local treatment advocates responded to their own circumstances and found solutions, and I congratulate them on what they have achieved.

However, not all searchers have successful searches. Good economics and common sense should be injected into the debate that searchers participate in, and searchers are also influenced by the availability of resources and political capital. The result in AIDS is that there have been a lot of searchers in treatment, and far too few in prevention.

WE WONDER: Would treatment advocates now be willing to make a forceful statement about the critical urgency of prevention?

How the war on AIDS was lost

There was an alarming article in the Wall Street Journal on the reverses of previous advances in AIDS prevention in Uganda, plus running out of US funding for AIDS treatment. The war on AIDS is being lost. Here are the facts:

1. There were an estimated 2.7 million new infections worldwide in 2008; 1.9 million of them were in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The number of people added to treatment each year is also increasing rapidly, but not rapidly enough to keep up with new infections. Worldwide in 2008, 1.1 million people were added to treatment; 825,000 of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.
2. New global funding for AIDS has grown rapidly over the past decade, but funding from the US government for major programs  PEPFAR and the Global Fund (a large portion of total AIDS funding)  now appears to be leveling off.

Despite the goal of “universal access to treatment” (a Millennium Development target that was supposed to be met by 2010),  only 44% of people in need of ARV treatment in Sub-Saharan Africa were actually receiving it. Now, as the WSJ story and other reports document, sick people are being turned away without treatment, and many who contract HIV in the future will have no hope of treatment.

Last year the WHO country representative in South Africa warned that "At the rate we are going, with new [HIV] infections rising it will be almost impossible ... to keep providing free treatment to those who need it."

How did this enormous tragedy occur? Perhaps because the global health community concentrated on AIDS treatment and neglected prevention (which they never figured out how to do). As was pointed out by David Roodman in Monday’s blog post, public attention and activism is a finite resource. In AIDS, virtually all of it was spent on treatment (led by the 3 Bs - Bono, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates - and 1 W) and very little on prevention.

Despite AIDS  getting unprecedented amounts of funding, funding was never going to be unlimited.   So there was going to a treatment funding crisis sooner or later, as Mead Over recently pointed out.

This current crisis was anticipated by writers like Helen Epstein, Daniel Halperin, David Canning, and Over. All have issued pleas for emphasizing AIDS prevention and given practical advice on doing prevention. All have been ignored.

Will there at last be a new war on AIDS that emphasizes prevention, that saves the next generation?

We'd like to thank the Academy...

Bill Easterly and Yaw Nyarko have their Sally Field Oscar moment (You like us! You really like us!) At least 5 of you! as they are interviewed by BBVA on the occasion of DRI winning the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in Development Cooperation Award.  They talk about the simple focus of DRI, their motivations for working on aid, and what the award means to them. Additional footage demonstrates that Easterly and Nyarko are not only serious aid critics, they can also play ones on TV.

DRI faculty and staff remain so taken by surprise that we got this award that we have reverted to our most atavistic instincts of relentless self-promotion...

More seriously, could this be one tiny sign that the tide is turning against mindless advocacy of more aid money, and towards advocacy for true accountability?

An oil purse is a curse, of course?

This post is by Adam Martin, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI. In development economics everyone knows that natural resources are a curse. A well-known study by Sachs and Warner found a negative correlation between resource abundance and growth rates, while subsequent studies have shown a negative relationship with democracy.

The Curse enjoys wide appeal. Aid skeptics like that it implicates oppressive domestic government and nationalized industries. Aid supporters are drawn to its emphasis on geography (destiny!) and the indictment of global markets. And on the popular level, no one makes a better villain than oil companies. But popularity doesn't stop the story from being hot, flat, and wrong.

New research argues that empirical work on the Curse suffers from two interrelated problems. First, it uses dependence (the share of GDP from that resource) and calls it abundance (the stock of a resource in the ground). But dependence in turn depends on institutional quality—if you have sound institutions, natural resources take their place along other industries. If not, natural resources will by default constitute a large share of GDP because poor institutions stifle an advanced division of labor. When you look at cross-sectional data using dependence as a proxy for abundance, it will look like natural resources compromise institutional quality.

That reliance on cross-sectional data is the second major problem. The Curse story does not claim that Nigeria is Britain plus oil, but rather that Nigeria is less democratic than Nigeria would be in the absence of oil. One way to get around this problem is to test whether oil makes country X less democratic using panel data with fixed country effects. That’s fancy econometric speak for taking into account other factors that might make country X more or less democratic—its history, institutions, culture, etc. Fixed effects also allow testing a corollary of the Curse known as the "First Law of Petropolitics": as oil prices go up, oil-rich autocrats crack down on democracy even more.

Digging into the recent research:

• Christa Brunnschweiler and Erwin Bulte tackle the first problem. They find a positive correlation between resource abundance and both growth and institutional quality, and argue that it is conflict and poor institutional quality that lead to dependence.
• Stephen Haber and Victor Menaldo offer a great review of the second problem. They present evidence that even natural resource dependence does not undermine democratization.
• Romain Wacziarg corrects for both problems, testing for the effects of high oil prices on democracy using panel data. Again, there is no evidence for the Curse.

These studies argue that, while the Curse is plausible, domestic institutions are simply too persistent for it to matter much. Will belief in the Curse likewise prove too persistent in the face of new and better evidence?

Dropping Haiti’s debt = sending old shoes

The following post is by David Roodman, a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) in Washington, DC. Last week my colleague Michael Clemens blogged in this space about the “The best way nobody’s talking about to help Haitians.” So as a complement, here’s what I think is the worst way that everybody’s talking about to help Haitians: cancelling Haiti’s debt.

I am not suggesting that Haiti’s foreign creditors should stick to their guns in order to teach the country a lesson about the sanctity of international debt contracts. Canceling or reimbursing Haiti’s debt payments over the next, say, five years, just as was done after the Asian tsunami, would make eminent sense. That would constitute debt relief but would not require debt cancellation.

Why not just cancel the debt outright, as the One Campaign, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and Oxfam have demanded?

• The benefit would be low. Most outstanding loans to Haiti are repayable over 25–40 years and charge 2%/year or less in interest. So while the face value of Haiti’s debt is impressive—some $1.25 billion, not counting the $114 million in new IMF credits—the debt service over the next few years will be tiny. The IMF projects (table 7) the cost at $18 million for fiscal year 2009/10, rising to $34 million in 2011/12. Even those figures are high since the U.S. government is paying the $9 million/year interest on Haiti’s loans from the Inter-American Development Bank. Perhaps half the rest is owed to Taiwan and Venezuela, whose susceptibility to press releases from western NGOs is uncertain. So as little as $25 million in debt service may be in play over the next 3 years.
• Lobbying for debt cancellation crowds out other more important issues. Activist groups and politicians have limited time, staff, and political capital. Instead of fixating on dropping the debt, why don’t activists and politicians campaign to hold public and private donors accountable for avoiding the mistakes of past disaster relief efforts? Why don’t they take on textile interests in order to open our borders to “Made in Haiti”? Why not, as Michael argued, push for a Golden Door visa that would allow at least a few tens of thousands more Haitians into rich countries to work?

Reforming trade and migration policies, even getting donors to respond more effectively to disasters, requires confronting entrenched interests. But activists are at their best when they take on the tough fights. We owe it to Haitians to strive for what is best for them, not easiest for us.

A couple of weeks ago here on Aid Watch, Alanna Shaikh blogged under the title, Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti. Beyond the specific advice, she was voicing a big idea close to Aid Watch’s heart: so many aid efforts go awry because the giver decides what the receiver needs.

I fear that calls to cancel Haiti’s debt are the old shoes of political activism. Debt relief will hardly help Haiti recover from the quake. And in a crisis, if you’re not helping, you’re in the way. Let us do the equivalent in the policy realm of sending cash, by advocating reforms that will do far more to alleviate the suffering.

What's so hard about nation-building?

From today's NYT

Quake an opportunity for foreigners to "get Haiti right"? Aid "shock doctrine"?

NEIL MacFARQUHAR in a good NYT story this morning  (self-promotion alert: I am quoted in the story) notes all the discussion that the quake is an opportunity to sort out all the problems of long-run Haitian development. But an opportunity for whom? Apparently for foreigners. The story mentions some of the proposals for foreign intervention:

Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization

{Bill Clinton as} Haiti reconstruction czar.

“Is it too wild a suggestion to be talking about at least temporarily some sort of receivership?” Senator Christopher J. Dodd, ....Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, echoed that thought, adding, “I think something far more draconian than just us working behind the scenes to prod reforms and those kinds of things is going to be necessary.”

This current debate is an ironic echo of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, which is an excessively hysterical rant on how conservative foreigners impose free market doctrine on poor countries when they are reeling from things such as...natural disasters. Beneath Klein's purple rhetoric is the germ of a good idea, however: foreigners should not exploit disasters to bypass local, homegrown choices. The liberal version of the "Shock doctrine" is that disasters are an opportunity to impose their own statist solutions to development.

Even if the recipient of "shock therapy" does not have a democratic government, foreign intervention is also non-democratic. You can't trust foreigners to have the right incentives and the right knowledge -- all they will wind up doing is delaying further the homegrown efforts of the locals to solve their own problems, with domestic politics distorted futher by xenophobic reactions against foreign intervention.

Foreign intervention is just another variety of the perpetual fantasy: the benevolent autocrat who will "get development right." We have already seen how this movie ends in Haiti, which has been the recipient of multiple military interventions and grand aid plans over more than a century -- with the unhappy results that were on display before the earthquake.

Haitians certainly could benefit from some foreigners providing relief and aid to individual , but only if the foreign providers are humble searchers  like Paul Farmer, and not grandiose and coercive foreign planners like those quoted above.

NYU’s Development Research Institute (including Aid Watch) receives 2009 BBVA Development Cooperation Award

Excerpts from the BBVA Foundation press release issued today: January 29, 2010 - The awardof €400,000 goes to the Development Research Institute (DRI) for “its contribution to the analysis of foreign aid provision, and its challenge to the conventional wisdom in development assistance,” in the words of the jury’s citation.

The DRI has brought a fresh approach to aid and development research, helping ensure that the economic aid rich countries provide to the developing world is better utilized. Its results question certain mainstream assumptions in development cooperation, like the idea that more generosity on the part of rich donor countries will have an automatic pay-off in poor country development.

“At a time when richer countries are being called on to increase aid expenditure, DRI has made it its mission to ensure that these resources are not wasted and that policy advice is effective,” concluded the jury in its resolution, which also singled out DRI’s determination to hold development assistance organizations and national aid agencies accountable to scientific scrutiny.

The DRI is co-led by two economics professors at New York University, William Easterly  and Yaw Nyarko. Easterly holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an expert in the political economy of development and the study of the effectiveness of foreign aid. Yaw Nyarko, one of the most highly ranked African academic economists in the world, is Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Theory and has acted as a consultant to organizations like the World Bank and the United Nations.

Regarding the real effectiveness of humanitarian relief, the DRI has repeatedly criticized the lack of information and feedback between donors and beneficiaries. This is part of the thinking behind its Aid Watch initiative, a digital platform where researchers, policy-makers, commentators and aid practitioners can debate developments and exchange experiences.

Their research emphasizes that decisions about the allocation of relief funds cannot be left to foreign governments or multilateral organizations. Instead, they need to take close account of the social, cultural and economic peculiarities of the receiving communities in determining how and where the monies can best be spent.

The Development Cooperation award went last year in the inaugural 2008 edition to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for applying scientific methods to assess the on-the-ground effectiveness of development assistance funding.

Development has a long memory: Children stunted today because of slavery in 1573

Fascinating paper by Melissa Dell at MIT on how indigenous slavery (called the mita)  in the mines of Peru and Bolivia from 1573 to 1812 left a lasting impact on development.

We're shocked to discover Jessica Simpson doesn't read our blog

Click here to watch the video.

Click here to read our blog post (by guest blogger Alanna Shaikh), just one of many pieces out there trying to give people good advice on the best ways to help in Haiti (HINT: NOT by sending them your old shoes.)

The iPad and women's rights

Within seconds of the unveiling of the iPad by Steve Jobs, Twitter lit up with women complaining and/or joking that the name immediately made them think of a certain feminine hygiene product. #iTampon was the #1 trending topic on Twitter yesterday and remains so this morning. Could this be one of those unintentionally revealing moments that women's rights in the US has not come as far as we thought? That women did not have enough voice or power within a major US corporation for it to anticipate this  marketing blunder?  That this wouldn't have happened if the head of Apple were named Stephanie Jobs?

That maybe along with dumping all over those evil Third World men that keep women down, awareness that there is a wee shortfall in women's equality in the First World?

Another lesson from this episode is the democratizing power of Twitter. None of the major newspapers (defined as the 3 that I get every morning: NYT, WSJ, and FT) mentioned the controversy in print today. Maybe women don't have enough voice or power at newspapers either.  (The WSJ does have an online article on it, although it is mostly just describing what happened on Twitter.) But Twitter is a more democratic medium that allowed women (and their male friends) to voice bemusement, anger, and ridicule. One small step for women, maybe some day a giant leap for womankind.

UPDATE: Dennis Whittle points out that sanitary pads actually ARE a development issue.

Product (RED): from ridicule to dialogue

This blog has ridiculed the RED campaign from all possible angles. We’ve questioned whether creating a few pennies of aid through buying a corporate product is worth all the hype, criticized the murky finances of the legal entity behind RED, and gone after RED co-founder Bono with jibes, fake awards and parodies. Displaying exceptional cool in the face of this mockery, Bobby Shriver, the other co-founder of RED, met me for a coffee. He could have gone all angry and defensive and preachy about His Great Initiative (which others in his place have done). Instead, he asked for suggestions on how to improve RED.

In response to my suggestion that RED source more products from Africa, he pointed to the “From Africa To Africa” coffee from Starbucks and said they had apparently not done enough to advertise they were already doing that. He also said he was open to discussing it more. I think RED marketing to support self-help by African entrepreneurs to sell in the US would be brilliant. (I have to report that the RED coffee I tried was OK, but nowhere near the Tomoca Coffee I purchased in Ethiopia – the best coffee I have ever had but difficult to buy outside Ethiopia.)

I too tried to be open-minded. He understands the politics of advocacy much better than I do: “You’ve got to get them talking about the cause at the Pig Roast” (the typical fund-raising event for a congressional candidate). Let’s give Shriver and RED credit for raising awareness of AIDS in Africa, not to mention of African poverty in general (although I’m sticking to my argument that the Bono/RED approach has led to some paternalistic and misguided remedies to those problems.)

Is ridicule a good way to promote dialogue? I don’t know. I don’t believe in “why can’t we all just get along” rather than debate. There are already plenty of people using aid-establishment-speak to talk politely around the issues—blunt critiques and satire can be useful to break that spell. Shriver also deserves credit for hearing the criticism and still being willing to engage in dialogue. I am wondering if sometimes I should look harder for dialogue before the satire starts.

The vacuous top and the resourceful bottom in the Haiti crisis

Meeting about Haiti in Montreal on Monday, representatives from 14 donor countries and the European Union came together and committed to a detailed, specific, well-coordinated plan … to come up with a plan. Chairman of the Conference, Canada's Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon:

We have a shared vision on the way forward, one plan that ties us all together. ... Clear vision, co-ordination and adherence to principles of aid effectiveness will be essential.

Stay tuned for the follow-up meeting to be held at the UN in March.

In the meantime, though, stories are filtering through from aid workers on the ground confronting practical constraints of bottlenecks and distributions…not waiting around for plans.

A team of US doctors who were among the first medical responders in Port-au-Prince described their experience in a scathing WSJ op-ed:

…Our operation received virtually no support from any branch of the U.S. government, including the State Department. As we ran out of various supplies we had no means to acquire more. There was no way to transfer patients we were poorly equipped to manage (such as a critically ill newborn with respiratory distress) to a facility where they would get better care. We were heartbroken having to tell patients suffering incredible pain we could not perform their surgery for at least a day….

Later, as we were leaving Haiti, we were appalled to see warehouse-size quantities of unused medicines, food and other supplies at the airport, surrounded by hundreds of U.S. and international soldiers standing around aimlessly.

The international relief and development blogger Tales from the Hood is now blogging from Port-au-Prince:

Wyclef Jean complained on Oprah about air-drops during week one: “My people are not animals…” And I would, of course, completely agree. They’re not animals. And I’d agree that air-drops are or should be a last-resort means, and are not standard relief distribution procedure. But then this is hardly a standard situation…. Back-of-the-cocktail-napkin estimates say that better than half of distribution events in Haiti since the earthquake turn violent, that violence ranging from beneficiaries beating each other up over bags of rice, to full-on looting of the truck, to shots fired and people killed. And his suggestion that perhaps he should coordinate distribution in Haiti is straight up the dumbest thing that I’ve heard in a very long time. … Maybe I should produce his next album?

A letter from the co-founder of the NGO SOIL, Sasha Kramer, provides a somewhat different perspective:

For centuries Haiti has been portrayed as a dangerous country filled with volatile and threatening people, unsafe for foreigners.

…this wall of fear … has had very serious implications for the distribution of the millions of dollars of aid that have been flowing into the country for the past 10 days. … much of the aid coming through the larger organizations is still blocked in storage, waiting for the required UN and US military escorts that are seen as essential for distribution, meanwhile people in the camps are suffering …

And then Kramer notes the contrast among the Haitians themselves.

The most striking thing I have noticed … is the level of organization and ingenuity among the displaced communities.  Community members stand ready to distribute food and water to their neighbors, they are prepared to provide first aid and assist with clean up efforts, all that they are lacking is the financial means to do so.

If you know of good first person accounts being written by aid workers in Haiti, please add them in the comments.

Why populism is popular with elites

Amusing quote from David Brooks' NYT oped today:

populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

The development version of populism is to appeal for stronger and more sweeping actions to help "the poor." Of course, those actions will be implemented by the development elite. Unlike domestic politics, both elites in development are usually Ph.D.'s.

There are the "pro-market" Ph.D.'s that claim to have expert wisdom on how to make markets work in poor countries (with insufficient knowledge of those countries' complex informal and formal institutions). Think shock therapy in former Soviet Union and structural adjustment/Washington Consensus in Africa and Latin America.

Then there are the "pro-state" Ph.D.'s that claim to have expert wisdom on how to make states work in poor countries to alleviate poverty (with insufficient knowledge on the politics and capacity of the state). Think industrial policy, protectionism, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers.

The alternative to top-down expert-driven populism in development is bottom-up development that promotes decentralized help and self-help by many, many actors...