 Michael Clemens (@m_clem)22-10-10 14:57 Don't miss this chance to learn: My co-author and I respond to the Millennium Village Project http://bit.ly/9bOC4d |
Friday, October 22, 2010
Chance to learn....
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Philanthropedia Launches Expertise on Demand
SSIR Opinion & Analysis
Back in May, I announced that I would be chairing a steering committee to help the nonprofit research group Philanthropedia launch a project called Expertise on Demand. The project is the realization of the Tactical Philanthropy Knowledge Network I had been working on and is designed to connect donors and funders with leading experts who can help them make informed giving decisions.
Expertise on Demand has now officially launched. From the Philanthropedia website:
"Expertise on Demand is a new Philanthropedia service that acts as a trusted intermediary connecting major donors, philanthropy advisors, and foundations with experts who can help fill knowledge gaps quickly and efficiently and channel more money to high-impact nonprofits and projects.
Donors use this service by filling in a brief form with the question they would like to ask an expert. Philanthropedia then searches its database of thousands of experts to find a good match, ultimately connecting the donor with the expert via a phone call.
The Process
- Submit your question
Have a question about which nonprofit to support or how you can plan your giving strategy? Submit a question related to your philanthropic goals here, and we will try to find an expert who matches your needs!- We find an expert match for you
We will try to match an expert who meets your needs by searching through our database of over 1400 experts with an average of 17 years of experience. View our experts here.- Expert confirms
We will contact the best-fit expert to answer your question.- Connect with expert over phone
We will schedule a 30 minute phone call at a time that works for both of you. We ask both the expert and the user to fill out a short evaluation form after the conversation so we can improve our service."
I'm very excited about the project's potential to accelerate the flow of impact oriented information. Experts are well positioned to give donors the context they need to make smart decisions. Experts know the "story" behind what is happening in the field, the personalities involved and the relevant history.
Too often, when we talk about information we think about discrete bits of data. But people who are experts, whether they are academic researchers, nonprofit executives, foundation program officers or your brother-in-law who knows everything there is to know about baseball, are able to provide rich, contextual information that is often far more valuable then the collection of data points you might gather on your own.
My hope for Expertise on Demand is that funders and individual donors will turn to the service as a quick way to access the sort of information you can't find on Google. Expertise on Demand is a way to connect with the right people instead of simply the right data.
Expertise on Demand is currently free. I do hope you'll consider giving the service a try the next time you are working to learn more about a social sector issue.
In addition to Expertise on Demand, Philanthropedia has recently launched multiple new cause areas and significantly upgraded the information they provide about the nonprofits they rate. They have now expanded to cover:
- Arts & Culture
- Childhood Nutrition/Health
- Climate Change
- Education
- Reproductive Health, Rights, & Justice
- Workforce Development
Nonprofit profiles of their top rated nonprofits now include expert commentary on each organization's strengths and areas for improvement, commentary from the nonprofit, bios of the leadership team, stories about the nonprofits beneficiaries, and detailed information about the experts involved including names, bios and information about who was invited to participate and who accepted.
At a speech yesterday about transparency for grantmakers, I pointed out that Philanthropedia represented not only a low cost, high quality source of information, but also a low cost, high quality solution for grantmakers to share what they know in an effort to increase impact.
If you are interested in joining Philanthropedia's network of experts, you can learn more here.
Sean Stannard-Stockton is CEO of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors, a philanthropy advisory firm that serves individual and family philanthropists. Sean is the author of the Tactical Philanthropy blog and writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He is a member of the World Economic Forum's Council on Philanthropy & Social Investing and has been quoted or referenced in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times and many other media outlets.
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Just how stereotypical are images of Africa?
Scarlett Lion
Following a link for Aid Watch, I read this article with interest:
The World Bank has apologized for displaying damning images of Ghana at its recent annual meeting in Washington DC. Some of the pictures have half-naked women breastfeeding their kids and portray a country high on poverty levels.
A journalist with the Daily Guide newspaper intercepted the images while covering the conference. He told Joy News the World Bank portrayed Ghana as a country full of hungry and miserable people. But the World Bank said the images are old and weren't meant to tarnish the image of the country.
The Country Director of the World Bank, Ishac Diwan, explained that the Bank's photo library was linked to a website that was available to delegates attending the conference and the reporter saw the photos because of that linkage. He commended the Daily Guide reporter for his observation and "for alerting us that such photos were on our website." He said some of the pictures were 20 to 30 years old, indecent and should not have been displayed on the Bank's website.
"We completely agree that they are offensive, and they prolong the kind of stereotypes that are really far from the reality and very much at odds with the image of Ghana that we want to project at the World Bank," he said. "I want to offer our apologies to Ghanaians and we very much regret any harm that has been done to Ghana's image," Mr Diwan stated.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how institutions and media outlets choose to represent Africa. For the most part, I actually think it's not as bad as some people make it out to be. Photos of starving children are no longer in vogue and fill the pages of newspapers and annual reports far less frequently than they used to. And what's more is that there's tons and tons of great photography being done as we speak. Archives will continue to be filled with old photos that reflect a different ethos of looking. But as photographers explore and find new ways to portray this vast continent, I'd like to think that these images really are becoming more and more a thing of the past.*
Readers: These opinions are based on spending a lot of time looking at obscure photo outlets and websites in addition to the mainstream, and actively seeking out images that aren't stereotypical, but what do you guys think about this? Are the image tides turning? Have you seen recent images that make you angry? or how about some thoughtful ones that made you ask a question? I'd love to see links and hear your take on this.
And, to get this conversation started, here are a couple of examples of great work that have been recognized by the photo-powers-that-be recently:
- Peter di Campo's series Living without Lights won the International Photography Award
- A beautiful series of portraits called Ghosts of the Sahara by Andrew McConnell has been widely published and received many accolades
- One of Joan Bardeletti's photos from his project on middle class Africa won a World Press award
*There will always be exceptions to this.
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Jake Kendall from the Gates Foundation on Mobile Savings
Financial Access Initiative Blog
People often find it hard to save money, the poor no less than the better off. Human nature plays its role, of course: it is hard to save for some intangible future when our wants in the present are so concrete. But the poor also lack convenient and inexpensive mechanisms to save. So what could happen if we remove those barriers?
"There are two interrelated challenges in getting viable savings services to the poor," says Jake Kendall, microfinance program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "The first is that the poor live too far away from bank branches, and the second is that their deposit levels are too small to make it cost-effective for banks to serve them. So our guiding light has been to promote business models that simultaneously extend geographic outreach and dramatically lower the cost of dealing with the poor. To date, mobile applications have promisingly done both those things."
Kendall says that there have been between 75 and 80 mobile money launches worldwide but only one unequivocal success story: M-PESA, the mobile payments service hosted by Safaricom in Kenya.
"A lot was right in the Kenyan market when M-PESA went live. There was a lot of rural-urban migration, lots of cell phones, a cell phone provider with huge market share that could establish trust and build a big agent network, a relatively forward looking regulator. The real nut that Safaricom cracked is getting agents and customers on-line at about equal speeds, so neither side was disappointed if there weren't enough of the other. In my view, none of the other mobile money deployments have made big enough up-front investments in marketing and agent acquisition. That is where we at Gates think we can help."
Jake Kendall will be speaking at the Microfinance Impact and Innovation Conference in New York City on October 21.
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Not one, but two quotes of the day
Chris Blattman
The first is from the world's most notorious aid critic:
What governments spend on relief work is secondary to what it spends on its armies.
…Merchants are the knights who will save this region from famine and must avoid investing in worthless projects.
Yes folks, that is Osama bin Laden in an 11-minute tape called Reflections on the Method of Relief Work.
Ironically, those are among the most intelligent 33 words I have ever read on development.
The NY Times has the full story. Hat tip to Eric Green, who also gets the second quote of the day:
In the second volume of Methods, Bin Laden is expected to call for evidence-based aid and the need for more randomized controlled trials.
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The new African jungle
Baobab
SITTING in an old planters house high up on the Usambara mountains in Tanzania the air is chill, the cows have Swabian cowbells from the German colonial period, and Catholic nuns compete with the Lutherans in production of jams, cheeses, yoghurts, and sides of gammon. It is not an idyll. On the contrary, life here is for many closer to purgatory, the trees hacked down, the soil ravaged, and the spirit of many of the young men broken. That story is coming, but for me, mzungu, visitor, it is quiet, pastoral, a place to read and think bigger Baobab thoughts.
In this regard, I was recently sent the latest edition of the remarkably nourishing Lapham's Quarterly. This one is all about the city, with essays, thoughts, and illustrations on the city over the ages. It gets me thinking about a favourite subject of mine: African cities. There is not much written on the tropical black cities that lie between South Africa and Egypt. They are painfully hard, shiny, to me sometimes like bubonic swellings about to burst, yet at the same time post-modern, vital—cities of gold, of new ideas.
One exception to the general dearth of thinking on the African city which I read recently is Cities of Change. This is a masterful architectural study of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, with wider application. The book was authored by Marc Angelil and Dirk Hebel, two professors at ETH in Zurich. As a technical university ETH is these days almost on a par with MIT and deserves be singled out for the intelligence and generosity with which it is approaching the question of future cities in poor countries.
Still, no matter that I am taken with architecture, civic space, proportions, and so on, my interest is in the political risk presented by malfunctioning cities. Here Lapham's Quarterly gives reasons to be depressed. Africa is historically ill-equipped to build great cities—there are no reference points. The African city is simply happening, a causality without thought, without planning, without ambition. Consider, those of us who live in Africa, this entry from Sir Christopher Wren, the English architect, in 1708 . Wren is arguing for burial grounds to be removed from the city to the outskirts:
"It will be inquired, Where then shall be the burials? I answer, in cemeteries seated in the outskirts of the town. A piece of ground of two acres in the fields will be purchased for much less than two roads among the buildings; this being enclosed with a strong brick wall and having a walk round and two crosswalks decently planted with yew trees... In these places beautiful monuments may be erected, but yet the dimensions should regulated by an architect and not left to the fancy of every mason—for thus the rich, with large marble tombs would shoulder out the poor."
Wren goes on to argue that such cemeteries would have the purpose not just of the repose of the dead, but also bounding "the excessive growth of the city with a graceful border, which is now encircled with scavenger's dung stalls."
Three centuries on, the appalling truth is that the aid industry, as well as the Washington and Brussels masters of benevolences, and not least African governments themselves, have focused on what is static, and ignored that which is shifting and dynamic. The countryside dominates, and the city is an afterthought. But this is not what economic history tells us. Give voice to a Wren, and the African city will lift up the villages. Remain heedless, and the failing cities will wreck everything else.
This evening, under my mosquito net, I am struck by the writing of Oswald Spengler, a German, who in 1917 wrote "The Decline of the West": "I see, long after the year 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today's and notions of traffic and communications that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness."
That holds true for Tokyo, not Kinshasa. The African city would be all too recognisable to Spengler, to Dickens and Balzac for that matter, as earthen streets of hope, workhouses, and detritus. According to Spengler, the city marks the end of "organic growth" and the beginning of "an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of agglomerations."
That makes me think of Lagos, which may be the third largest city on the planet by the end of the decade. By 2020 there will be thirty or forty or more African cities larger than Rome or Berlin. Many of them will be highly unstable. Will they have cemeteries with crosswalks decently planted with trees? I hope so. But equally they may not have public transport, security, or water. What is clearer to me is that African history will be the history of its cities, not its villages or wild areas.
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The plight of the African intellectual – a moral fable
Aid Watch
Once upon a time, there were two great lands: Donorlandia and Africa. Donorlandia had many intellectuals who opined about the solutions for Africa, who received much attention in the media of Donorlandia. Few African intellectuals received as much, or even any, such attention when they discussed their own land.
Donorlandia's intellectuals could work for great universities, or for think tanks, or for aid agencies. What's more the aid agencies and charitable foundations often gave no-strings-attached funding to the independent intellectuals at think tanks or universities who worked on Africa, or created new Research Centers on Africa. Independent African intellectuals had small cash-starved African universities or think tanks, and they received hardly any no-strings-attached funding from Donorlandia's aid agencies or charitable foundations.
The main option for African intellectuals was to work for aid agencies, where they would no longer be independent, be reporting to non-African bosses, and where their insider perspectives on Africa were seldom appreciated. Independent African intellectuals who criticized aid agencies were vilified and marginalized.
Intellectuals from Donorlandia led individual aid projects or research studies for Africa. Intellectuals from Africa could work for these projects or studies or research centers, but they had little hope that their insights about local culture or conditions would be respected or reflected in the projects and studies. Projects or studies or research centers led by independent African intellectuals did not receive funding from aid agencies or charitable foundations.
Some of the very best African intellectuals left Africa and became independent in the great universities or think tanks or research centers of Donorlandia. But the aid agencies and charitable foundations disqualified these African intellectuals from leading projects or research centers, due to Fear of the evil spirit called Brain Drain.
Donorlandia had once given international scholarships to encourage even more intellectuals in other lands like America-Latina — so much so that by later times, such intellectuals were now making policy and dealing as equals with aid agencies in America-Latina. But Fear of Brain Drain had paralyzed aid agencies and charitable foundations in Africa in later times, and there were few or no international scholarships to encourage African intellectuals.
African intellectuals bravely persisted under such adverse conditions, believing that one day many more of them also could be independent, that one day they could lead their own projects, think tanks, and research centers, that one day they could be the ones to comment on their own continent and receive the attention they deserved.
Editorial note: This fable is based on many informal discussions I have had over many years with African intellectuals, who for obvious reasons do not want their names used (with the occasional rare exception). I use the literary form of a fable precisely because of this restriction, which means none of the statements can be verified. If it resonates with you the reader, then maybe it's of some use. If not, then feel free to dismiss it for lack of verifiable proof.
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Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Corn fed
The Economist: Daily news and views
Another agricultural commodity surges
THE US Department of Agriculture's unexpected warning that America's production of corn (elsewhere known as maize) would drop by 4% in 2010 has sent prices rocketing. They rose by 8.5% on October 11th, the biggest one-day rise in 37 years, and by mid-week corn was trading at $5.88 a bushel. The fact that prices for other crops such as soyabeans and wheat are also bubbling makes it difficult for farmers to judge which will be the most profitable crop to sow for next season, and that may hamper an immediate supply response. The concentration of farming in a few big countries means that a hungry world is dependent for its food on stable production patterns in a small number of places. Whether Russian wheat or American corn, problems in one country can send shock waves through global markets.
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Ethics and Economics (And Coffee Too)
The Business Ethics Blog
A bit of economics can go a long ways in helping understand a range of issues in business ethics. I'm not an economist myself, but I've read a fair bit of economics here & there. And I want to read more. In order to arrive at sound ethical conclusions, you need more than just ethical beliefs: you need some understanding of how the world works. For many issues in business ethics, economics provides relevant facts.
For example, consider ethical issues related to price. Prices are clearly important to all of us: the price of a thing tells us how much we would have to pay to get it. But economists recognize that prices play two other very important social roles, roles that are important to the way the economy as a whole operates.
First, a price conveys information. When something is expensive, that tends to convey the fact that it is scarce — scarce enough that buyers are willing to pay a lot for it, and are perhaps even competing with each other and hence bidding up the price. Likewise, when something is cheap, that generally conveys the fact that it is plentiful. (Note that scarcity can be either natural, a straightforward matter of the amount of a thing in existence, or artificial, as when some person or company gains monopoly control over the supply of a thing.)
Second, a price provides motivation. People are generally (though unevenly) motivated by money, and by money-making and money-saving opportunities. (If you really don't care about money, you should send me all of yours. Thanks.) Among those who want to buy a good, high prices tend to lower demand, and low prices tend to increase it. Price also affects suppliers. The fact that the price for a given good or service is high is going to tend to motivate people to want to get into that line of business. A low price is going to tend to deter people from making that their line of work.
Now, how does that understanding of the social role of prices affect a real-life issue in business ethics? Here's a simple example of the social function of prices at work, and why economics matters for ethics. It's an example I learned from the book, The Undercover Economist, written by economist Tim Harford.
Consider coffee. Coffee is a hugely important commodity — second only to oil on the world market. Most people know they now have the option of buying 'fair trade' coffee, the aim of which is to make sure that the people who grow coffee get a fair deal for what they produce. (October is "Fair Trade Month," by the way.)
Hartord's argument is this. Coffee farmers are poor, and will generally remain poor, because the thing they produce isn't scarce. Coffee is relatively easy to grow, and can be grown in relatively many (hot) places. Buying fair trade coffee (at a premium price) means paying coffee farmers more. Now, recall what I said above about the role of prices in motivating people. Paying more for coffee is likely to draw more growers into the business. And drawing more growers into the business will increase the supply of coffee. And if you increase the supply of coffee, you inevitably depress its market price — and along with it the wages of those who labour on coffee plantations. So it's hard to make coffee growers alone better off, until workers in other industries (like the garment industry) are well-enough off that they can't be attracted into the coffee industry by (for example) fair-trade-driven higher wages. According to Harford (p. 229):
High coffee prices will always collapse, until workers in sweatshops become well-paid blue collar workers in skilled manufacturing jobs, who don't find the idea of being even a prosperous coffee farmer attractive.
That makes it awfully hard, if not impossible, to boost net wages in the coffee industry, in the long run. Now, that by itself is nothing like a conclusive argument against fair trade coffee. But a sound understanding of the economic role of prices does give reason to pause before we accept the notion that we can make people better off simply by voluntarily paying more for a non-scarce commodity. (I've blogged before about other problems with the fair trade notion. See: What's so Fair About Fairtrade?)
As I noted above, I'm not an economist — so if someone reading this can help by correcting anything I've written here, or add any further detail, I'd be grateful.
—-
Here are a few books about economics that I recommend (not all equally good, and I recommend them for different reasons). All of them are aimed at non-economists, and 2 of the 4 are even written by non-economists.
- Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism, by Joseph Heath
- The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford
- The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
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Deworming research results based on work in Busia by ICS, largely
funded by Liberty Foundation >
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~tkousser/Miguel and Kremer.pdf
funded by Liberty Foundation >
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~tkousser/Miguel and Kremer.pdf
Millennium Villages: don’t work, don’t know or don’t care?
Aid Watch
UPDATE 10/16 12:25PM: Tim Harford in FT also covers Clemens and Demombynes paper and gets response from Sachs.
In a new paper, Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes ask:
When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when a necessity?
The authors study the case of the Millennium Villages, a large, high-profile, project originally meant to demonstrate that a package of technology-based interventions in education, health and agriculture could lastingly propel people living in the poorest African villages out of poverty within five (now ten) years.
One way Clemens and Demombynes get at their central question is to examine how the Millennium Villages are (so far) being evaluated, and ask whether a more rigorous method of evaluation would be 1) feasible and 2) likely to yield very different results. They answer 1) yes and 2) yes.
They start by looking at the findings of a Millennium Villages midpoint report released last summer, which shows movement on indicators (higher crop yield, more cell phone usage, fewer cases of malaria, etc.) against a baseline of data collected in those same villages three years prior. In the graph of cell phone ownership in Kenya below, this progress is charted by the black line.
Clemens and Demombynes then put this data in the context of how non-Millennium villages in the same country and region are faring on these same indicators, using publicly available data from national surveys. These are the red, blue, and green lines in the figure below.
What is going on in non-Millennium Villages in Kenya to drive up the number of cell phone users? Conventional wisdom is that it's driven in very small part by outside aid and in large part by entrepreneurs, small and large. (There are a whole series of these graphs included in the paper, many show more improvement in MVs than in comparators, while a few show worse performance in MVs.)
The paper goes on to describe the weaknesses in the MVP's published plans for future evaluations, which do involve comparison villages, and suggests how future waves of MVP interventions could be more rigorously evaluated without spending a lot more. (Summary here.)
The MVP team responded to the critique, saying that it "misunderstands the MVP's aims and evaluation methods." They shift away from portraying MVP as a demonstration project: the "primary aim" is "to achieve the Millennium Development Goals in the Project sites."
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the Ghosts of Africa’s future
Africa Works
The future of Africa remains a prisoner of Africa's past — but not for the reasons usually invoked.
The legacy of colonial rule and the earlier ravages of slave trade forever changed the "trajectory" of African development. That is the biggest cliche of African studies, however axiomatic. What is less appreciated is how "independence" from colonial rule was constructed in order to promote personal rule of a sort that, however unique to the sub-Saharan, exhibited parallels with forms of personal rule elsewhere in the world, notably in China (under Mao) and the Soviet Union (under Stalin).
Zambia provides a lesson in microcosm of the past as prologue for Africa's future. The country's independence movement delivered a crypto-Marxist national leader, Kenneth Kuanda, who over the years constructed a form of personal rule that profoundly influenced Zambian society as well as its political culture. In a new essay, Chanda Chisala, one of Africa's brightest minds on political economy and culture, examines the legacy of Kuanda, who left the presidency nearly years ago — and yet despite the distance of time, Zambians have had great difficulty in escaping the long shadow of his (mental) tyranny. Chisala's article, published in Zambia Online, has quickly become one of the most read pieces of writing in Zambia's history.
There's every reason why Zambians are devouring Chisala's frank assessment of the long tail of post-colonial history. Writing with a verve and nuance rare in African letters, Chisala delivers a body blow to the standard version of African marginalization and suggests a new vision for integrating the fragmented pieces of Zambia's national narrative. "Let our history books be reset," Chisala writes. "The struggle for African independence was not always as hard (or perhaps even as urgent) as our old "freedom fighters" and their "historians" claimed. What has been really hard is the struggle against tyranny – after independence."
Chisala's words should leave all friends of Africa speechless, and yet breathless with anticipation. Out of these ashes, what comes? Something better, surely.
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@NewPhilanthropy, 18-10-10 16:48
 NPC (@NewPhilanthropy)18-10-10 16:48 Why impact measurement is best kept simple: latest from NPC's blog http://tiny.cc/51dpk |
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