Area Man's Starbucks Purchase Finally Ends African AIDS Epidemic

by Jeff Raderstrong at the blog Change Charity:

After deciding to add a bag of (Starbucks) RED brand coffee on top of his vente mocha latte order, area man Bill West completed the final piece of the puzzle to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa...

"This is a great day for humanity," said Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, where Starbucks made the $1 donation--taken from West's purchase--needed to rid the continent of the disease that had crippled it for decades. "All of our work, all of our time, all of our hopes are now validated by this one last push to end AIDS in Africa."

...Bono, humanitarian activist and U2 front-man, reached out to the broader global community to recognize the efforts of the people that made it possible.

"It is important to remember what went into this momentous occasion," said the rock star, one of the founders of the Product RED brand. "The Product RED line successfully mobilized Western consumers to go out and buy things they either already had or only moderately desired under the guise of social responsibility. With out these compassionate consumers, or the compassionate Starbucks marketing directors who decided to give up razor-thin amounts of their profit margin to the Global Fund in exchange for the Product Red partnership, this debilitating disease would still be destroying Africa."

Jeff Sachs, welcome to Twitter!

As of 11 am today (2/26), Jeff Sachs has started posting on Twitter as @jeffdsachs. Here is some of the early traffic in which yours truly has a tiny stake (I have omitted who did the T for privacy): (anon): Just noticed that @bill_easterly is following @jeffdsachs but not vice versa / Hilarious

@bill_easterly: This hurts :>) RT  Just noticed that @bill_easterly is following @jeffdsachs but not vice versa

@jeffdsachs: Hello friends, thank you for the warm welcome.

@jeffdsachs: RT @EndOfPoverty: mobile phones and internet in Africa means changes to life in fields, in clinics,... http://fb.me/5LOwcWe

@bill_easterly: I agree w u on mobile potential RT @jeffdsachs mobile phones in Africa means changes to life in fields, in clinics,... http://fb.me/5LOwcWe

(anon): Pigs just flew!! RT @bill_easterly: Agree w u on mobile potential RT @jeffdsachs mobiles in Africa means changes to,... http://fb.me/5LOwcWe

(anon): WHAT? My entire belief system just corroded to nothing RT @bill_easterly I agree w u on mobile potential RT @jeffdsachs http://fb.me/5LOwcWe

(anon): Hell just froze over! RT @bill_easterly:I agree w/ u on mobile potential RT @jeffdsachs mobile phones in Africa (cont) http://tl.gd/c0m70

(anon): Ahem, @jeffdsachs where are you? The whole developmentgeek twittersphere is waiting for you to reply to @bill_easterly

OK let's remain calm. It's only been one hour, and Professor Sachs may have a less compulsive/healthier relationship with his iPhone/Crackberry than some of the rest of us.

*&^$#@%*()^% I just burnt the cookies, gotta go.

UPDATE: 3/1/10 8:16am: another T from Jeff:

@jeffdsachs: @uncultured Thank you so much for the kind words. Your project is amazing and your videos, truly inspiring. Keep up the great work! {about 21 hours ago via TweetDeck}

in response to:

@uncultured: The one who inspired me to believe we can end extreme poverty (and to start my project) is now on Twitter - @JeffDSachs #FollowFriday

The Economist Debate on Finance for Good or Evil: Round 2 Turns Up Heat

The debate now going on at the Economist is providing one of the most exciting and insightful looks at What We Learned about Finance from the Crash. The debate is very relevant for the role of finance in development (which Levine has devoted his career to studying). Debate is now on round 2 and you can vote for your favorite. Stiglitz has a small lead at this point; my vote still goes to Levine. Joe Stiglitz:

while many of the recent innovations may well have contributed to the bonuses of those in the financial sector, or even the short-run profits of the industry, the link between these innovations and overall economic performance remains unproven....Naked credit default swaps (CDS), betting on the death of other firms, opened up new incentives for doing mischief, with a greater chance of not being caught and less certain punishment....The contrast between the surfeit of so-called innovations that are socially unproductive or worse, counterproductive, and the dearth of innovations in {more productive} areas is striking....

Ross Levine:

There is no reason to believe that the centuries-old synergistic connection between financial and economic development recently ended... Mr Stiglitz overemphasises the impact of financial innovations on the crisis and underemphasises the role of policymakers in triggering financial abuses....Repeatedly, and many years before the crisis, a prominent task force organised by Timothy Geithner (then president of the NY Federal Reserve) warned of the dangers {of Credit Default Swaps (CDSs)}. But senior officials did nothing. This was not a failure of information, nor of regulatory power; and, it does not reflect an inherent evil with CDSs. It was a failure of high-level policymakers to respond....In contrast to Mr Stiglitz, what has disturbed me the most is the resistance of some within the financial policy apparatus to recognise the malfunctioning of the regulatory regime during the decade before the crisis. The authorities failed miserably to fulfil their core responsibility...

Chronicle of a death foretold

When the article Madagascar: Textile Industry Unravels came across our desks yesterday, we were saddened but not surprised. That’s because people on the ground have been predicting this outcome (and Aid Watch has been stubbornly blogging about it over and over). Multiple critics have protested ever since the US government, hoping to force President Andry Rajoelina’s questionable government to hold elections, first threatened to remove preferential trading rights for Madagascar. The Malagasy textile industry was a clear success story of the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which removed US quotas and duties from thousands of products from eligible African countries. Madagascar’s exports tripled in the first three years of the program, and the textile sector, which made up 60 percent of Malagasy exports, accounted directly for 50,000 jobs and indirectly at least 100,000 more.

The US pulled the plug on AGOA at the end of December and import duties of up to 34 percent were reintroduced. Now we are starting to see the effects in the formal and informal economy:

• Factories closing and factory jobs lost: “As lead times [expire] on orders placed before the agreement [came to an end], factories are laying off workers and we are seeing an explosion in the numbers of unemployed,” said the director pf the Association of Free Trade Business in Antanarivo.
• Increased competition among street traders now that former factory workers are pushed out to sell goods in overly crowded street markets (and lower wages now for both): “‘I used to be able to earn 20,000 ariary ($9.30) a day,’ said Soloniaina Rasoarimanana, who has been selling clothes from a pavement stall for 10 years. ‘Now, with the political crisis and more competition, I earn around 5,000 ariary ($2.30) a day.’”
• Knock-on effects in neighboring countries (Mauritius, Swaziland, Lesotho, South Africa) which made inputs like zippers to Madagascar’s factories.

Among the effects we are NOT seeing: signs of increased interest in arriving at a power-sharing agreement or instating democratic governance on the part of Rajoelina’s government.

Ineffective sanctions, effective job destruction.  An unaccountable branch of the US government hurts poor people far away who have no voice in US politics. Deeply saddened…we don’t know what more to say.

Paying for school on $2 a day

When James Tooley first discovered low-cost private schools for the poor in urban slums and rural areas in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and China, aid agency officials and local government administrators did not receive the news warmly. Most flat out denied that such schools existed. Even if they do exist, said the experts, they can’t possibly be any good. School owners that run for-profit schools in shantytowns and poor villages are just exploiting poor communities. Their teachers are untrained and poorly paid. Their buildings are cramped, dark and filthy. Worst of all, kids don’t learn anything there—they come out “half-baked,” one education official told him.

But what Tooley found, in four years of site visits and a five-country study described in his book The Beautiful Tree, throws a wrench in this familiar-sounding reasoning. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of students in the impoverished areas he studied were in fact attending these allegedly nonexistent schools, even when public options were available.

Why on earth would a poor family just getting by on the meager wages they earned fishing or pulling rickshaws choose to pay between $1.50 and $7 a month to send their children to private schools if they didn’t have to? In some isolated villages, the closest public school was still too far away, or impossible to get to during the rainy or cold seasons. For other families, the hidden costs of “free” education outweighed the very low cost of schools in their communities (in Kenya, for example, one parent described high up-front costs for a building maintenance fund and two complete school uniforms required by the public schools in her area).

Most reasons that the parents gave for their choice had to do with what the World Bank calls the “short route” to accountability (as opposed to the “long route” which works through the political process). Because school owners’ profits and reputations in the community depend directly on whether parents are happy with their children’s schooling, they paid attention to parents’ complaints. Because teachers in private schools can be fired, they were less likely to be late, idle or absent.

The most surprising thing to those of us who harbor prejudices (hidden even to ourselves?) that illiterate, unschooled parents can’t possibly know more than education experts, is that these parents were making smart, informed decisions. Not that the private schools were perfect—far from it: many of the schools Tooley visited were tucked away in poorly lit, dilapidated, smelly buildings without toilets, and teachers there did lack government training certificates, and were paid less than in the public system. But Tooley found that in low-cost private schools, across the board, classroom sizes were smaller, and teachers were much more likely to be found teaching during an unannounced visit. They are also achieving better results: the students in private schools outperformed their public school peers in nearly every subject they were tested in.

Tooley’s is just one study, and this post has given only a very general outline of its findings. (For a more in-depth look, buy the highly readable and entertaining book, or delve into the academic papers). But one lesson seems clear: Tooley’s work should open the door to more open-minded research on how private schools for the poor can play a part in achieving education for all.

Is Finance Evil? Vote Now at the Great Online Debate at Economist.com

UPDATE  2/24 9:45am: since the post below was written, Stiglitz has seen vote swing his way. Cast your own vote early and often! Paul Volcker said after the crisis: "I wish that somebody would give me some shred of neutral evidence about the relationship between financial innovation recently and the growth of the economy."

There is a longstanding historical tradition of suspicion and hostility towards finance. It goes all the way back to the medieval prohibition of "usury," if not further.  Many have long accused financiers of useless "speculation" that enriches themselves at the expense of everybody else.

Didn't The Crisis reinforce all of these doubts ten-fold? Shouldn't developing countries be even MORE wary of those financial tricksters? (Volcker  thinks the only useful finance innovation in our generation was the ATM).

And in a new online debate at the Economist, Joe Stiglitz backs up Volcker with all his Nobel-Prize-winning artillery.

On the other side against History and Hard Times and Heavyweights is one brave economist, Ross Levine, arguing that financial innovation is still GOOD. In fact, he says it's Indispensable to future Economic Growth both in rich and poor countries. And so far he's winning the argument! -- go to the web site and decide for yourselves -- and then cast YOUR vote.

(Full disclosure: Ross happens to be my friend  and frequent co-author. But he would have gotten my vote anyway.)

Is writing about Africa different if the writer is African?

A Post From @kiwanja UPDATE 2/24 3:30 PM. There have been a lot of great comments and discussion back and forth.

Analyzing We are the World for Haiti as a Music Critic and Aid Critic

Even aid critics have their sentimental side. I confess I was genuinely moved watching this video, which has been viewed more than 13 million times on YouTube. The video is very inspiring and well done. It made me let myself go and be carried along by the idealism and hope.

Unfortunately, my kids would like to point out that I also get sentimental listening to Scorpions' "There's No One Like You" , so  I may not be the best qualified music critic available.

So going back to my comparative advantage of being an aid critic, a couple of questions on the lyrics of We are the World at 25 for Haiti :

[Adam Levine] We are the ones who make a brighter day so lets start giving.

Dear Mr. Levine,  it touches me as a wee bit hubristic to restrict "brighter day" making abilities to "we" who are "the ones." Are you saying you are one of "the ones"? By the way, who are you?

[Will-I-Am] "Like Katrina, Africa, Indonesia and now Haiti needs us, they need us, they need us"

Dear Will-I-Am, Did you choose Indonesia to receive aid because it rhymes with "they need us"?

Aside from these quibbles, more power to all you artists who participated in this ! Can you let us know who to contact to make the "We aid agencies are accountable to the Haitians for results" music video?

Invading Canada to debate aid

Bill Easterly is speaking in Toronto tomorrow.

When: Tuesday February 23, 2010, 4pm-6pm

Where: University of Toronto, Hoskin Avenue, Seeley Hall, Trinity College

(He will be largely offline for the next two days while taking part in this peaceful invasion.)

Even more apparently even more not a big fan...

Another post from @transitionland:

Bill Easterly’s cheap, ignorant Afghanistan snark...

Apparently not a big fan...

Easterly’s pointless echo chamber

Maybe I’m being too harsh on professor Easterly. Wait, no I’m not. He becomes petulant when anyone from a fellow blogger to a large multilateral organization doesn’t immediately respond to his criticisms, yet he often ignores the most knowledgeable and thoughtful of his own critics....

Posted in Aid, Bloggers, Blogging, Development, Stupidity

February 21, 2010 at 5:06 pm

Written by transitionland

The Niger Coup

Niger just had a coup. Has Paul Collier decided yet whether to send in foreign troops?

Engaging stakeholders to reach MDG on vampire reduction -- using wooden stakes

From the blog New Beat

Reaching out to stakeholders in the international arena is now considered crucial to building sustainable development coalitions with timeliness, scale and impact. What has remained unexplored in the field is liaising with stakeholders for a different goal, albeit often with the same means: to use the wooden stakes they hold to end vampire insurrections.

Some NGOs CAN adjust to Failure: The PlayPumps Story

Back in the 1990s, a billboard advertising executive in South Africa had a very good idea. Spinning on a merry-go-round connected to a water pump, children could generate plentiful, clean water without the time-consuming, hard work of traditional hand pumps. At the primary schools in South Africa where the first of these merry-go-rounds were installed, kids got a place to play, their communities got free drinking water, and girls and women, who bear much of the burden of collecting water for their families, got time to attend school or pursue other activities. Billboards lining the raised water tank brought in advertising revenue to fund the pumps’ maintenance, and spread public health messages about hygiene or safe sex.

In 2000, the idea won the World Bank’s Development Marketplace award. In 2006, Laura Bush announced $16 million in funding from USAID/ PEPFAR and private foundations, with the goal to raise $45 million more to install 4,000 pumps in Africa by 2010. Jay-Z pitched in with concerts and an MTV documentary. PlayPumps announced plans to expand, first to Mozambique, Swaziland and Zambia, and then to Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The nonprofit launched a sophisticated social networking campaign, and successfully raised money for “100 Pumps in 100 Days” on World Water Day in 2007 and 2008.

Sadly, somewhere along the way, PlayPumps stopped being a smart homegrown idea and became a donor-pleasing, top-down solution that simply didn’t fit many of the target communities.

The charity WaterAid wrote a position paper on why they did not adopt the PlayPumps technology. For one, they said, PlayPumps are too expensive. At $14,000 each, they cost four times as much as traditional pump systems. The mechanism requires specialized skills to repair and so can’t be fixed with local labor, and spare parts are hard to find and expensive to replace. WaterAid also decried the system’s “reliance on child labour.” A recent critical commentary in the Guardian calculated that children would have to “play” for 27 hours every day to meet PlayPumps’ stated targets of providing 2,500 people per pump with their daily water needs.

An aid worker and engineer in Malawi documented some of these problems in a brilliant series of blog posts. His anecdotes and pictures give limited but compelling evidence that PlayPumps in his area are not being used as the inventors intended:

Each time I’ve visited a Playpump, I’ve always found the same scene: a group of women and children struggling to spin it by hand so they can draw water.

He also suggests one reason why PlayPumps might be slow to get that crucial feedback:

[A]s soon as the foreigner with a camera comes out (aka me), kids get excited. And when they get excited, they start playing. Within 5 minutes, the thing looks like a crazy success…. I’ve always figured that as soon as I leave the excitement wears off and the pump reverts back to its normal state: being spun manually by women and kids.

Does the story of PlayPumps carry a broader lesson about the aid world? Suppose the organization had charged ahead with a Twitter campaign to raise millions for THE solution to water problems in Africa, while reality kept diverging from their rosy picture.  Then PlayPumps would represent the triumph of bad but photogenic solutions in a broken aid marketplace.

BUT last fall, the CEO announced instead that their inventory would be turned over to the organization Water for People, where PlayPumps would be just one option out of “a portfolio of technologies from which communities can choose.” This seems like the right outcome. We can ask why it took so long to see the flaws in the PlayPumps model. But in contrast to the official aid world, where the old failed solutions keep getting recycled across 60 years, this is real progress!

Adorable child in NGO fund-raising photo sues for royalties

The law firm Klayme, Chaise, & Steele LLC announced today that one of their clients was suing the prominent non-governmental organization (NGO) Care for the Children (CFTC) for unauthorized use of the client’s photo as a child.. The lawyers revealed their client is now a sophomore at a university, but refuses to give his name or home country to protect what is left of his privacy. The client remembers vividly the day he came across the cover of the CFTC brochure “Give for the Sake of the Children”, which featured a picture of himself as a child. The lawyers said, “At no time was permission given to CFTC by the child, his parents, or legal guardians to take such a photo, much less to broadcast innumerable copies of it around the Western world to gather funding for this organization.”

Moreover, the lawyers said, “at no time was our client compensated by Care for the Children, a beneficiary of such organization, or even aware of the existence of this organization.” Klayme, Chaise, and Steele LLC have filed a court petition to have Care for the Children turn over its photographic records to bolster their claim.

Lord Mall Blacke, a spokesman for Care for the Children, said they doubted the lawyers could prove their client was the same as the one in the photograph. “We don’t keep records of individuals in our photographs. We don’t know when this photograph was taken, or where. We can only guess it was somewhere in Africa. Or maybe Haiti.”

Other NGOs with similar photo and fund-raising practices are watching the case nervously.

DISCLAIMER: Klayme, Chaise, and Steele LLC is a fictional limited-liability corporation under New York State law, and hereby reserves the right to make fictional statements about non-true occurrences and related non-existent organizations and individuals to score heavy-handed satirical points for serious purposes.

Four Ways Brain Drain out of Africa is a good thing

Conventional wisdom frets that the exodus of skilled workers—the brain drain—is bad for African countries. The share of Africans with college degrees who live outside their home countries is certainly high: nearly half of Ghanaians, about 40 percent of Kenyans, and about one-third of Ugandans. The metaphor of the term itself implies that brain drain is a waste, as if all Africa’s most promising minds were being sucked down some global sink, leaving behind a parched continent. But a paper by William Easterly and Yaw Nyarko, published as a chapter in the new book Skilled Immigration Today: Prospects, Problems, and Policies, explores the arguments for and against brain drain, and builds on previous literature to argue four ways the benefits of brain drain could outweigh the costs to African countries.

1. Gains to migrants themselves. Why is this often ignored in brain drain discussions? Perhaps it reflects a neglect of the rights and well-being of individuals and an overemphasis on the nation-state as the object of development. The migrant is better off with higher living standards, not to mention satisfying her revealed preference to live in a country other than where she was born.

2. Gains to migrants’ families. Remittances is the most obvious and commonly-cited benefit of the brain drain. Even using official figures, which likely far undercount the value of remittances by excluding informal channels, remittances sent back by Africans abroad outweigh the cost of educating them at home. Why pass up a high return opportunity (Africans earning high incomes abroad and remitting) and insist on a low return activity (educated Africans underemployed at home)? Not to mention that families also get satisfaction from seeing their offspring realize their dreams.

3. Brain circulation.  Brains don’t just leave Africa, never to return.  Africans who have been educated or worked abroad do come back to their home countries to visit, to establish dual residence, to start businesses and universities, and, sometimes, to stay. These people bring back new ideas and skills—crucial ingredients to economic growth. Similar processes brought enormous benefits already to Asia and Latin America, so why would donors want to shut down this motor of opportunity only for Africa?

4. Stimulation of skill accumulation (“brain gain”). The possibility of migration and the example of role models who find success abroad (the Kofi Annan factor) provide incentives for young students to work hard and gain skills that will help them overcome the hurdles to migration. The authors argue that the new human capital created through these incentives offsets the loss of skilled people who do eventually leave.

If brain drain is not the bogeyman it is made out to be, those who argue for programs that restrict individual freedom in the name of “staunching the flow of brains” from Africa have even less of a case. (For example, the World Bank and the IMF published a 2007 report noting that “countries concerned about a ‘brain drain’ of their trained physicians to OECD markets might be able to reduce risks by setting national training requirements slightly lower than the rich countries’ standards.” The group Physicians for Human Rights has recommended that “[d]eveloping countries and organizations in developing countries should explore possibilities of limiting recruitment from abroad.”)

A better way to help migrants, and the African countries they come from, would be to increase even more the benefits of the so-called drain. For example, scholarship and exchange programs will increase the likelihood of brain circulation. Regulations and technologies to reduce the transaction costs of remittances sent home will be win-win for all.

Would Americans put up with a program that inhibits them from working in London or Paris? Skilled African migrants don’t need international organizations suggesting restrictions on where they should live and work either.

Lincoln’s Birthday Valentine’s Day Declaration: I ♥ Democracy

Democracy doesn’t attract as much love as it deserves in aid and development circles. Many wonder if benevolent autocrats might be better for development than messy elections, even though there is no evidence to support benevolent autocracy. There is a strong positive association between democracy and LEVEL of per capita income, which at least some authors argue is causal. (It’s true there is no robust association between democracy and GROWTH of income, but then there is no robust association between GROWTH and ANYTHING.) But even if there had been SOME material payoff to autocracy, why don’t we care more about democracy as a good thing in itself?

Many just can’t get that excited about majority voting. But the MECHANICS of democracy (majority voting among many others) are not the essence of democracy, which is about VALUES. The latter we care a lot more about than the former. The donors who try to promote democracy are unfortunately obsessive about the mechanics and silent on the values.

Lincoln’s Birthday was February 12, so this is a good excuse to use the Emancipator to clear things up:

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

The brilliance of this definition is how it also includes equality. No group is so second-class that we can deprive them of their rights without opening the door to deprivation of our own rights. Slavery is an extreme that can be generalized to all forms of oppression by arbitrary self-appointed authorities, which then leads to guaranteeing all individual rights.

I think I care about slavery -- and my risk of being enslaved -- a lot more than I care about whether elections are winner-take-all or proportional representation.

These soaring ideals had very practical consequences. The brilliant work of economic historian Joel Mokyr links the Industrial Revolution to changes in ideas and ideologies. Putting my own spin on Mokyr, the idea of individual freedom from arbitrary authority transformed many fields besides politics, opening them up to many more independent participants:

•Scientific democracy: ANYONE, no matter how junior, can overturn wisdom of anyone, no matter how senior, using scientific method.

•Technological democracy: ANYONE, any junior innovator, can overturn incumbent elites with something new that just “works.”

•Social democracy: ANYONE can be a social reformer, as long as they persuade their fellow ANYONES of a social evil.

So the freedom of the individual as a VALUE was far more consequential than any specific MECHANICS on how this idea was implemented -- like the endless obsession with electoral rules.

Drawing on Aid Watch’s endless and increasingly farfetched supply of metaphors, here’s another timely example of mechanics vs. values:

mechanics:

The hypothalamus transmits chemicals to the pituitary gland, which releases hormones into the bloodstream, creating a rapid heartbeat and lightness in the head.

value that corresponds to these mechanics:

Love

Perhaps some Valentine’s Day Development Bureaucracy worked on the mechanics, say a Hypothalamus Transmission Stimulation Program, featuring “results indicators” like heartbeat speed. But I think most Valentine’s Day celebrations stressed the value rather than the mechanics.

How Borders bookstore defines "social sciences"

This is a little bit different from how "social sciences" are defined at New York University.

What the World's Leaders did on their Winter Vacation: Nothing

Mark Thoma has a different take on Davos than our little dust-up on this blog about Refugee Run:

Faced with the opportunity of a generation to fix global finances, the world’s most powerful people went skiing.

Perhaps @amonck would like to start a dialogue with Professor Thoma?

Maybe I can "help." I think Davos has always been oversold as a global problem-solver, in the same category as G-7 summits. There is no good historical evidence that grand international meetings devoted to collective international action to solve problems successfully do so.