Digital Archive....

True professionals don't fear amateurs Seth's Blog Professional farmers don't begrudge the backyard gardener his tomato harvest. That's silly. And talented mechanics certainly don't mind the antics of the Car Talk guys (or their listeners). Sooner or later, if you need a real mechanic, you'll find one, and if you don't, well, that's fine too. A few years ago, typesetting, wedding photography, graphic design and other endeavors that were previously off limits to all but the most passionate amateurs started to become more common. The insecure careerists fought off the amateurs at the gate, insisting that it was both a degradation of their art as well as a waste of time for the amateurs. The professionals, though, those with real talent, used the technological shift to move up the food chain. It was easy to encourage amateurs to go ahead and explore and experiment... professionals bring more than just good tools to their wo...

Cloud computing enabling entrepreneurship in Africa The Official Google Blog In 2007, 33-year-old Vuyile moved to Cape Town from rural South Africa in search of work. Unable to complete high school, he worked as a night shift security guard earning $500/month to support his family. During the rush hour commute from his home in Khayelitsha, Vuyile realized that he could earn extra income by selling prepaid mobile airtime vouchers to other commuters on the train. In rural areas, it's common to use prepaid vouchers to pay for basic services such as electricity, insurance and airtime for mobile phones. But it's often difficult to distribute physical vouchers because of the risk of theft and fraud. Nomanini , a startup based in South Africa, built a device that enables local entrepreneurs like Vuyile to sell prepaid mobile services in their communities. The Lula (which means "easy" in colloquial Zulu), is a portable voucher sales ...

How effective is overseas aid? | Clare Short and Ha-Joon Chang Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk The government has ringfenced overseas aid, but is that the right thing to do? Former development secretary Clare Short debates the issue with economist Ha-Joon Chang At a time when almost all budgets are facing cuts, the Chancellor has ring-fenced 0.7% of GDP for foreign aid. Was he right to do so? Economist Ha-Joon Chang and the UK's former international development secretary Clare Short discuss. Aida Edemariam listens in. Clare Short: The UK spends about £8bn on aid. We spend more than £40bn on defence and £600bn on public expenditure, so £8bn is a tiny part. You've got to have funds for famines and crises – and beyond that, Britain massively exploited its colonies in Africa and elsewhere. Funding that helps countries speed up their development is just about decency, and also about the world being safer and more secure...

Pormes: 'Asociaal, onbegrijpelijk en onbeschaafd' Vice Versa Sam Pormes is door Personele Samenwerking in Ontwikkelingslanden (PSO) uitgezonden naar de Molukken in Indonesië. Vice Versa ontmoet hem op Ambon, de plek waar zijn wortels liggen en hij bijna anderhalf jaar heeft gewoond en gewerkt. Door de bezuinigingen kan hij zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het eiland verlaten. Pormes uit felle kritiek op het Nederlandse ontwikkelingsbeleid en de ontwikkelingsorganisaties. Door de bezuinigingen van het vorige kabinet kan Sam Pormes (54) zijn werk niet meer voortzetten en moet hij het voor hem bijzondere eiland Ambon in Indonesië verlaten. De plek waar hij zich echt thuis voelt. 'Voor het eerst in mijn leven hoef ik mij niet te legitimeren, wie ik ben en waar ik vandaan kom', aldus Pormes die in het verleden onder meer voor GroenLinks in de Eerste Kamer zat. Sinds 1989 is hij betrokken bij OS en de Molukken. Op dit moment is hij voorzitter van stic...

Is China Really Building 100 Dams in Africa? China in Africa: The Real Story I've just a short article on the website of the Oxford University China-Africa Network stating that Beijing is involved in "more than 100 dams" in Africa. Really? Here's what the author, Dr. Harry Verhoeven, says:  "Beijing especially is using its formidable technical expertise in hydro-infrastructure and immense foreign reserves to resurrect dam-building overseas: in half of all African countries , from the Sudanese desert and the Ethiopian lowlands to the rivers of Algeria and Gabon, Chinese engineers are involved in the planning, heightening and building of more than 100 dams . The tens of billions of US dollars and thousands of megawatts involved in these projects have so far remained off the radar in the China-Africa debate, but are possibly more consequential for the future of the African continent than the exports of oil, copper and other valua...

The Last Hunger Season: a fine but flawed study of poverty in rural Kenya – Review by Magnus Taylor African Arguments Reporting Africa is too often a game of big politics: elections, coups, terrorists, oil deals and Julius Malema. You can easily be an expert of all these things by reading everything available online, but as well-informed as this may make you, you still won't have the faintest idea what it's actually like to live the life of a person who lives there. This, however, is the great strength of Roger Thurow's new book: The Last Hunger Season: a year in an African farm community on the brink of change. It also happens to be its weakness. Here's why. Roger Thurow cares about Western Kenya. In authoring The Last Hunger Season, he spent enough time in the region to really know what living there is like. Thurow sought to write a book that followed the fortunes of 4 small-holder farmers as they negotiated the challenges another year brought t...

Safaricom & CBA Launch MShwari Bankelele This week saw the launch of what is likely to be a revolutionary mobile phone product  called  M-Shwari . It comes from two long term partners - Kenyan mobile company Safaricom, well known for it's world famous  mobile money product - MPesa, and a local bank, the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) who have been custodians of M-Pesa funds for years MShwari is a savings and loan product that is immediately accessible to the 15 million users of Safaricom's  MPesa. It gives them access to banking services – savings and loans without having to walk into a bank hall or fill out a single form. It allows them to save as little as 1 shilling (earning interest of between 2-5% a year) or borrow as little as 100 shillings (Kshs 100 is equivalent to about $1.17) and attracts no account maintenance fees or transfer fees.  It will be a great product for people who run informal businesses and take money home at...

China and Mauritania: Whatever Happened to the Railway? China in Africa: The Real Story In 2007 and 2008, many of us read in the Western and Chinese media that a Chinese-Sudanese joint venture was going to build a railway to Mauritania's phosphate deposits in the border town of Kaedi, and that China Eximbank had agreed to finance 70 percent of the $686 million project. This project was listed in the World Bank's 2008 study of Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa, Building Bridges , and has been assumed by many to be ongoing. I was more skeptical about this project, as there was no further word about it after 2008. I didn't include it in my 2010 book, The Dragon's Gift . But I always wondered what had happened. Now we know, and the answer is: nothing . In an April 2012 article, " Phosphate of Bofal: Dream or Reality? ", a Mauritanian journalist,  Ahmed Yahya Kowri, solves the puzzle. He writes that he'd been hearing about the po...

Deborah Bräutigam, Professor and Director of the International Development Program at Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, debunks common myths surrounding Chinese investment in Africa The West is worried about Chinese investment in Africa. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton regularly makes veiled references to the danger of Africa's "new colonialists". Last summer, UK prime minister David Cameron warned Africans about the risks of partnering with authoritarian China. Why? Everyone knows that the Chinese are aggressive newcomers to Africa, only interested in resources, including land to feed China's growing population; bringing in all their own workers in countries desperate for employment. Yet much of what "everyone knows" about Chinese investment in Africa is simply wrong.   In July, as rain beat on the roofs of the Chinese-run Eastern Industrial Zone outside Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, I walked along the production lines where more than 80...

http://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2012/11/19/visualizing-the-arms-trade/ (verzonden vanaf tablet)

Slowing population growth in Malawi is essential for poverty reduction strategies to work Eldis Ageing Populations Malawi adds over 400,000 people each year to its population. Without a reduction in the average number of births per woman, health, education and employment ...

Inequality and the rise of the global 1%: great new paper by Branko Milanovic From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green Ricardo Fuentes on an important new paper . Tomorrow, Ricardo and I continue the conversation The rich in the West are getting richer. Many countries have experienced a sharp concentration of incomes over the last three decades. The top 1% of Americans have doubled their share of national income (from 8 to 17%) since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated 32 years ago – see graph, source here . The elite in other advanced economies, including, Australia, the UK, Japan and Sweden, have also gotten a larger share of the pie. We have been able to understand the concentration of incomes at the national level thanks to the study of tax records by enterprising scholars such as Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Picketty and Sir Anthony Atkinson. But until recently, we didn't know much about the global concentration of incomes (there's no global tax collector with a similar...

How Africa's first commodity exchange revolutionised Ethiopia's economy | Lauren Everitt Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Eleni Gabre-Madhin on how a market has empowered Ethiopian farmers by focusing on distribution as well as production While government leaders, NGOs and corporations devise strategies to churn out more food for future generations, Eleni Gabre-Madhin is taking a different approach. Concerned by a 2002 famine in her home country of Ethiopia that followed bumper crops in 2000 and 2001, the Stanford-educated economist decided it was time to go beyond food production and take a hard look at distribution. The result? Africa's first commodity exchange. As the founder and outgoing CEO of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange ( ECX ), Gabre-Madhin established a reliable interface for buyers and sellers to meet – an idea that has inspired other African countries to follow suit. Gabre-Madhin won the Yara award at the African...

How do people die? Global mortality and causes of death visualised Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk What kills people around the world - and how does it vary from place to place? Simon Rogers

How committed is Europe to development really? Owen abroad This joint post with Alice Lépissier and Liza Reynolds first appeared on Views from the Center .  It  announces the launch of the Europe Beyond Aid initiative and presents a summary of the research and preliminary analysis in its first working paper . Europeans more than pull their weight in aid to developing countries. Last year Europeans provided more than €60 billion ($80bn) in aid, more than two and a half times as much as the United States. European members account for just 40% of the national income of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) but give more than 60% of the aid . Furthermore, Europeans have reason to be proud of the quality of aid they give. They tend to focus on poverty eradication and sustainable development, and have largely shaken off the vested commercial interests in tied aid. But development cooperation means more than effective aid. The partnership agreed a yea...

How do we offer credit to unidentifiable people? Innovations for Poverty Action Blog Carmen Easterwood How do you offer a loan to a farmer that can provide no evidence of his credit history or even of his true identity? Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries face this question every day, as they work to extend credit to people living in countries without credit bureaus, national identification systems, or sometimes even formal identification documents like birth certificates. Without a unique identification system, MFIs cannot track a client's credit history, either within a single organization or across multiple lenders. When MFIs do not know who has a good credit history, there is no way to give creditworthy clients access to more and bigger loans, and no way to restrict clients with a history of defaulting. In a recent study of farmers in rural Malawi, IPA Researchers Dean Yang, Xavier Gine, and Jessica Goldberg looked at how lo...

A challenge to the international community to do much more on ageing in the development sphere Eldis Ageing Populations With one in nine persons in the world aged 60 years or over, projected to increase to one in five by 2050, population ageing is a phenomenon that can ...

Is it wrong to cut UK aid to India? Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad Today's announcement that the UK is to end financial aid to India by 2015 will re-ignite the debate about aid to middle income developing countries.  It's a difficult one.  Is India rich? No--its GDP/capita is a third of China's and a sixth of Brazil.  India is still a very poor country.  You won't see it so much if you go to Delhi or Mumbai but go one hour out of town and you will be shocked.  Is India using its domestic resources as well as it can for poverty reduction? No, but it is trying to get it right--hence the debate over the massive National Food Security Bill.  Why should a country with a space programme get aid?  As I have said before the space programme is as much about weather and land quality mapping as about anything else.  Is UK aid "peanuts" for India as a Indian Minister said in February?  In absolute terms, yes.  But it...

"The End of Cheap Chinese Labor" Chris Blattman At the beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker was only $1,004 in U.S. dollars …However, wages are now rising in China. In 2010, the annual wage of a Chinese urban worker reached $5,487 in U.S. dollars …China's wages also increased faster than productivity since the late 1990s, suggesting that Chinese labor is becoming more expensive in this sense as well. China's labor force may have already reached its peak in 2011; and China's rural-to-urban migration will also slow down because the rural young are highly rural-to-urban migration will also slow down because the rural young are highly mobile; almost all rural youth in the 16–20 age bracket are already working off the farm. …Therefore, future increases in migrant labor must come from those who are older or those who have established families, who will require the prospect of larger wage gains than...

How to bring education to the poor in Africa – By Richard Dowden African Arguments A Mvule Trust pupil goes to school in Uganda. In 2006 some friends of mine were given $5 million by Lisbet Rausing for education in Uganda. They set up an NGO called Mvule (named after a beautiful Ugandan tree), and asked me to be a Trustee. We decided to spend the money on adolescents, especially girls, who had done well at primary or secondary school but had to drop out because their families were too poor to support them. Identifying them was a labour-intensive and expensive business, but over the next five years some 2500 were selected and places in good schools found for them. They were supported throughout, not just with the fees, uniforms and books, but everything that would try to make them equal to other students, such as travel money, soap and sanitary towels for the girls. They were also provided with mentors and visited regularly by Mvule workers. We also set aside mon...

Who Created M-Pesa? Bankelele M-Pesa is officially over five years old and is celebrated as the greatest use of mobile money in the world with about 15 million users. But the question of who created M-Pesa has never been resolved..until now.  On Sunday, there was a day long outage of M-Pesa which Safaricom attributed to  a power outage on a Vodafone server in Germany and this started quite a bit of discussion on twitter about why the service is run from Germany and how authentically Kenyan M-Pesa really is.  I've been in touch with Paul Makin before and so I invited him to join the conversation by tagging him and he went on to engage by giving answers to questions from twitter pals like @MediaMK @IddSalim @TerryAnneChebet and @Coldtusker who were genuinely interested and drove the conversation.  Excerpts:  - No-one GIVES me authority. As the original architect, I TAKE it. - Original team was Nick Hughes and me. I came ...

Co-operative model could be the answer to economic woes Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Beyond the ethics, co-operatives have weathered the recession well – and private enterprise would do well to take note Jiang Xingsan's day job is helping to run a vast agricultural group, the All-China Federation of Supply and Manufacturing Co-operatives, which serves millions of farmers across China, and has increased its payroll by 200,000 in the past year alone. But he was in Manchester last week, paying tribute to the Rochdale Pioneers. "I'm especially proud to come to Manchester, because this city was the birthplace for co-operatives," he says. When the so-called Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society set up shop in 1844, promising good quality food at fair prices, and a share of the profits for their customers, they couldn't have known that their big idea would spread around the world. More than 7,000 people, from 90 countries...

Economists: Things We Are Ignorant About The Big Picture Economists have been stumped by the past dozen years. The Dotcom collapse was an early warning that economists, as a class, were not clued in. Sure a handful recognized that there were budding problems — think Bob Shiller — but he was notable as an exception. Then we had the entire debacles of 2000s – derivative implosion, housing collapse, credit crisis, market crash — and we found that the vast majority of economists are academic theorists who were completely blindsided by events in the real world. And those were the good ones, as opposed to the biased hacks whose goals have nothing to do with discerning objective reality. We need to admit that Economists, as a profession, are stumbling around in the dark. To quote  Edward Hadas, " Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns ." ...

Just Do It SSIR Opinion & Analysis By Liana Downey & Megan Golden When it comes to measuring impact, perfect is often the enemy of good. Nonprofits and governments often aim too high and struggle to get started as a result. Most organizations understand that by measuring impact they can identify problems, improve their programs, and attract funders, but many organizations still are not doing it. In our work with nonprofits and governments around the world, we've heard leaders articulate a number of barriers to impact measurement. Three of the most common ones are: It's hard to get reliable data on our impact. We won't know if our program caused any changes. We don't have the resources to measure our impact. The most important first step in overcoming these barriers is to put the ideal of perfection aside and just get started using existing tools. Getting accurate data on impact Program managers face two challenges: choosi...

Ethiopia: a tale of two development models from the valley where we began – By Richard Dowden African Arguments Amentu, Ethiopia The Rift Valley in Eastern Africa is our hole in the ground, where we all come from. Not far from here our earliest ancestors stopped hanging out in the trees and started to use their rear limbs to get around on. From here we began to migrate and multiply all over the world. Today a line of worn tarmac runs along the valley floor, fed by earth tracks through fields of stubble lying brown and empty after the harvest. Wriggling lines of green mark streams which lead to the Awash River. The east and west horizons are bordered with crazy grey mountains jagging into a light blue sky. Flashing like mirrors in the sun are the valley's huge blue lakes and, in recent years, vast rigid squares of plastic sheeting have sprung up. Two models of development sit cheek by jowl where mankind began to emerge some 3.6 million years ago. One model is s...

China-Africa Oil Ties: How Different from the US? China in Africa: The Real Story An updated report from the Council on Foreign Relations on China-Africa Oil Ties makes several statements that made it past reviewers (and that reflect conventional wisdom): Quoting journalist Howard French, the report says that " unlike the West , China 'has declined to tell African governments how they should run their countries, or to make its investments contingent on government reform '."  And quoting Fanie Herman and Tsai Ming-Yen, the report says: " The U.S. focuses on humanitarianism, good governance, and democratization of petroleum-producing states in their oil diplomacy approach," unlike China. I would have expected better than this in a report coming from the Council on Foreign Relations. Is the US oil diplomacy approach really focused on good governance and democratization in Equatorial Guinea, Angola, or Saudi Arabia? I don't think so. Ha...

When we (rigorously) measure effectiveness, what do we find? Initial results from an Oxfam experiment. From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green Guest post from ace evaluator Dr Karl Hughes (right, in the field. Literally.) Just over a year ago now, I wrote a blog featured on FP2P – Can we demonstrate effectiveness without bankrupting our NGO and/or becoming a randomista? – about Oxfam's attempt to up its game in understanding and demonstrating its effectiveness.  Here, I outlined our ambitious plan of 'randomly selecting and then evaluating, using relatively rigorous methods by NGO standards, 40-ish mature interventions in various thematic areas'.  We have dubbed these 'effectiveness reviews'.  Given that most NGOs are currently grappling with how to credibly demonstrate their effectiveness, our 'global experiment' has grabbed the attention of some eminent bloggers (see William Savedoff's post for a recent example).  Now I'm back with an...

What do DFID wonks think of Oxfam's attempt to measure its effectiveness? From Poverty to Power by Duncan Green More DFIDistas on the blog: this time Nick York, DFID's top evaluator and Caroline Hoy, who covers NGO evaluation, comment on Oxfam's publication of a set of 26 warts-and-all programme effectiveness reviews . Having seen Karl Hughes's 3ie working paper on process tracing and talked to the team in Oxfam about evaluation approaches, Caroline Hoy (our lead on evaluation for NGOs) and I have been reading with considerable interest the set of papers that Jennie Richmond has shared with us on ' Tackling the evaluation challenge – how do we know we are effective ?'. From DFID's perspective, and now 2 years into the challenges of 'embedding evaluation' in a serious way into our own work, we know how difficult it often is to find reliable methods to identify what works and measure impact for complex development interventions.  Althou...

NGO warns DfID is forgetting disabled children Global development news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk Global Campaign for Education welcomes progress on girls but warns DfID is forgetting disabled children and other minorities The UK government needs to rethink its education programmes to better support marginalised children and young people in accessing education in poorer countries, according to a report published by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) UK on Wednesday. The report, Equity and inclusion for all in education (pdf), analysed 14 of the Department for International Development's (DfID) operational plans. It found that, while the department has a clear mandate to ensure girls attend school, there is little evidence that it is addressing barriers to education faced by young people with disabilities, or those from particular religious minorities or ethnic groups. The needs of children living in vulnerable situations or location...