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Millennium Villages Project continues to systematically overstate its effects Africa Can... - End Poverty by Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes The Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is an experimental anti-poverty interventionin villages across Africa. In October, we released evidence that the Project's official publications were overstating its real effects, and we offered suggestions on improving its impact evaluation. On Tuesday the MVP, whose leadership and staff are aware of our work, continued to greatly overstate its impact. read more Sent with Reeder  

Africa's top five billionaires - Business News - African Business Review Notes Africa's top five billionaires 56 Share Number 1- Mohammed Al Amoudi Ethiopia's richest man as well as the richest black person in the world Mohammed Al Amoudi is worth $10 billion. His broad portfolio of businesses include oil, mining, agriculture, hotels, hospitals, finance, operations and maintenance. He also owns Swedish refinery Preem and Svenska Petroleum, which made big plays in Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria and Angola in 2008. Al Amoudi has invested more than $1 billion in Ethiopia. He controls his vast business conglomerate through two holding and operating companies, Corral Petroleum Holdings and MIDROC. He employs over 40,000 people through these companies. Al Amoudi holds an honorary doctorate in Philosophy from Ethiopia's Ad...

Open Border Cost Overcoming Bias The simplest most reliable way to help the world's poor a lot would be for rich nations to accept more poor immigrants. While doing so would lower the price of many goods and services that poor immigrants provide, it should also lower the wages of natives who compete for similar jobs.  If rich nations completely opened their borders, how big might this reduction be?  It seems that even if 90% of the workforce were immigrants, average native wages wouldn't fall by more than ~10%.  From a new NBER immigration lit review: Their survey of the earlier literature found that a 10% increase in the immigrant share of the labor force reduced native wages by about 1%. Recent meta-surveys … found comparable, small effects across many studies. … The large majority of studies suggest that immigration does not exert significant effects on native labor market outcomes. Even large, sudden inflows of immigrants were not found to re...

Why development history matters for the Millennium Villages Project Aid Watch by Ed Carr , Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina A growing volume of critical writing on the Millennium Villages project (MVP) includes blog posts, journalistic pieces ,  scholarly works , and, recently, one partial social impact study . Nearly all point to project outcomes that could have been avoided had the project seriously engaged with the long history of field-based experiences in development. Here, I will focus on just one example: Because the MVP did not critically evaluate the effect of its own assumptions about what works in development, a conflict between project goals and the needs of the villagers has emerged in at least one site. The MVP is part of Millennium Promise , an effort to make progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  As a result, the MVP framed its interventions around the...

China poised to pour $10bn into Zimbabwe Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Zimbabwean government rejects concern that Beijing cash could prop up Mugabe, and says investment can turn economy around Zimbabwe could be in line for a windfall of up to $10bn (£6.19bn) from China, a potentially huge boost to its ailing economy, its ministers have claimed. But such an investment would be likely to heighten concerns about president Robert Mugabe's increasingly warm relationship with China , which has been accused of turning a blind eye to human rights violations across Africa. Zimbabwe's coalition government is putting up a united front on the issue, however, insisting that Chinese investment in mining and agriculture could help turn the economy around. Tapiwa Mashakada, a government minister and member of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), told Reuters on Monday: "We have met with officials from China Development Bank and...

Who knows more about the world – you or a Chimp? Gapminder Hans Rosling's Test is now live on Facebook. Play to find out if you know more about the world than a Chimpanzee! Some of you may already follow us on Facebook, otherwise please also visit our Facebook page and become a fan. Sent with Reeder  

Dark Skies After All SSIR Opinion & Analysis In my last post, I posited a bright future for microfinance —a future I'm still hopeful will emerge. But since I wrote that post, a couple of troubling developments have left me a bit deflated. One is the release of the Malegam commission report in India. The Malegam commission was set up by the Reserve Bank of India to review microfinance regulations and propose any needed changes. The positive intent of many of the Malegam recommendations are clear. But the likely, though unintended, consequences of many of these recommendations is deeply concerning. There are a number of excellent detailed reviews (with varying opinions) of the Malegam commission so I'll skip over the details while encouraging you to read David Roodman's , IFMR's and Rajan Alexander's take. My concern is that the net effect of many of these recommendations will be to calcify the microfinance industry in India. That...

Do You Have a Mission Statement, or Are You on a Mission? Dan Pallotta There's a clothing drop box down the street that says, "The American Red Cross of Massachusetts is a humanitarian organization, led by volunteers, that provides relief to victims of disasters and helps people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies." Good enough, so far. But adjacent to those words, in a font four times the size, and in bold, mind you, are the words, "Mission Statement." Which made me wonder, is this Red Cross's mission, or its mission statement? I don't want to go off on the Red Cross — the messaging on the drop box could just be some junior graphic designer's idea, and not an organizational mandate. But it spoke volumes about what was in the mind of the person who put it there. It gave away the context in which that person's work occurs: public relations. See, if you're on a mission, the box says something like, "Red...

Everything you ever wanted to know about mobile money Chris Blattman I've heard rumors that Kenya's mobile money system–cash by cell phone–has grown so big it holds more influence over the money supply than the central bank. Not sure if it's true, but Billy Jack and Tavneet Suri tell us many interesting M-PESA facts in this new paper . we report initial results of two rounds of a large survey of households in Kenya, the country that has seen perhaps the most rapid and widespread growth of a mobile money product – known locally as M‐PESA – in the developing world. We first summarize the mechanics of M-PESA, and review its potential economic impacts. We then document the sequencing of adoption across households according to income and wealth, location, gender, and other socio‐economic characteristics, as well as the purposes for which the technology is used, including saving, sending and receiving remittances, and direct purchases of goods and services...

What's it like to live in a Millennium Village? Aid Watch In Mayange, a cluster of villages about an hour's drive south of Kigali, Rwanda, interventions by the Millennium Village Project across all sectors (in seeds, fertilizer, malaria nets, health clinics, vaccines, ambulances, water sources, classrooms, computers, cell towers, microloans and lots more) aim to lift villagers out of poverty within five to ten years. What do we know about the effects of such ambitious projects on the lives of the people living in these impoverished, rural communities? A qualitative study by Elisabeth King , a post-doctoral fellow with Columbia's Earth Institute, produces a fascinating if limited* "snapshot" of social impacts of the Millennium Village Project in Mayange. A few observations: The villagers King talked to were reluctant to bare all to a foreigner asking questions about delicate social topics. Her questions about quality of life, trust, and soc...